While the horse meat scandal thunders on, the Government continues to busy itself with bolting the stable door. The question now is whether it’s more than, in Owen Paterson’s phrase, “a labelling issue”; tests are under way to see whether any horse meat was contaminated with (Mr Paterson again) “an injurious substance”. Number 10 has insisted that there is no evidence of a public health risk.

But they must take care not to speak too soon. Let us not forget the tragic case, well known to small children, of the old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly, but none the less she survived, and furthermore survived swallowing a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog, a goat and a cow. But it was swallowing a horse that did for her. As the coroner solemnly concluded at the inquest, “There was an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.”

Investigators now believe, however, that the old lady had no intention of swallowing horse; she’d meant to stop at cow, but tests have since revealed that the cow, purchased at Tesco, was in fact 60 per cent horse.

With panic rising throughout the nursery rhyme community, the Environment Secretary has ordered an inquiry into what happened to the cock horse after it was ridden to Banbury Cross. He has additionally called on the Food Standards Agency to find out what became of the white horse, also at Banbury Cross, last seen being ridden by a fine lady with rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. Eyewitness reports claim that she has music wherever she goes.

This afternoon Mr Paterson faced the Commons. He didn’t yet know who was to blame, but he was very angry with them. “Completely unacceptable… flagrant adulteration… either gross negligence or criminality… defraud the customer...”

Mary Creagh, his opposite number from Labour, called him incompetent. Tories howled their indignation. They couldn’t have looked more disgusted if they’d just been served a cheese-and-pony sandwich.

Mr Paterson shot to his feet. “She’s got a nerve!” he shouted, more closely than ever resembling an apoplectic owl.

Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con, NE Somerset) had a stab at stand-up comedy. Food regulation, he quipped, wasn’t “an area of European competence” but "an area of European IN-competence!”

As they say in the clubs: he’s here all week. Don’t try the veal.

Vegetarians, of course, are feeling terribly smug about the scandal, an attitude that suggests they have no inkling of the scandal that is soon to break about supermarket vegetables.

As anyone who has worked in the food industry knows, there is no such thing as a “carrot”; this cheerless comestible was in fact dreamt up by an unscrupulous Romanian grocer in 1892, as an underhand means of flogging leftover pork. These leftovers – snout, bones, gristle and all – are mashed into a tasteless pulp, left to harden, chopped into roughly conical shapes, and finally sprayed orange for marketing reasons.